Les SDFs

In the Jardin du Luxembourg, I found myself staring at two lovers on a bench. I would have called it "making out", but that seems such an un-French phrase, so perhaps I will say that they were kissing and caressing.

I was jealous, embarrassed, and sad, in that order. Also I was feeling something else, something that people would call being happy for them. But I think that was just a mask to hide the green envy. I wondered if the homeless men on 57th Street felt happy for the students who chatted and joked as they ignored the men and went in to eat burgers at the Med. They would eat the whole burger even though they were full after eating only half. I know because I did the same thing.

There was one time, during Passover. I try to talk to them, at least, to acknowledge their existence. People have a right to exist, to take up space and block the path of photons. But I said I didn't have any change, which may or not have been true. I went in and, on account of the holiday, ordered a burger with the bun on the side. I was eating alone so I ate fast. When I was done I took the bun, planning to give it to the man outside. When I got out the door, he was gone.

I was surprised at the homeless people in Paris. In France, whose love of acronyms is second only to the Pentagon, homeless people aren't homeless, they're SDF - sans domicile fixe or "without fixed domicile". Just letters. Like racism, homelessness is not part of the black and white Paris. It's not part of the cabarets.

Now some organizations have been giving homeless people tents. The idea is that, by being visible, they will force the government to act. While I was there I saw a few tent cities - sometimes called Quixote cities after a homeless rights group the Children of Don Quixote - near the northern railroad station.

Of course, the homeless were visible before the tents. They were on the metro, on the streets, on the buses. And they laughed. The wine - which even they could afford - helped I'm sure. But still, I was amazed at how they laughed. Unlike the guys on 57th street, who were either incredibly polite or cursed people out, these people laughed as they drank and slept God knows where.

Flying home

The plane shuddered in the turbulent air. As it moved from side to side, the heads of all the passengers, barely visible above the seats, move in unison against the motion of the plane.

While we waited to take off, the flight attendant had told jokes over the PA. Pirate jokes - Where does a pirate go to get a burger? Harrrrrrdee's - and one knock-knock joke. He didn't joke now, in the air. Yet we were all calm.

We flew directly over the University. The red-roofed buildings of the quad framed the grounds. The buildings had no height, they were Euclidean shapes - rectangles inside bigger rectangles - on the great plane of the Earth.

Square blocks extended as far as I could see, up until the water. Where the shoreline could not be perfectly fitted by a tessellation of uniform rectangles, the city surrendered by building parks.

The view was similar over Indiana, except squares of corn and soybean fields took the place of city blocks. MidWestern Man, it seemed, must live in squares.

The shadows of the small white clouds, arranged in constellations between the plane and the ground, looked like lakes on the forested landscape. A lake either drained into or was fed by a long narrow river that flowed along the road. I suppose it is more correct to say that the road flowed along the river.

The first peaks of the Appalachians scrolled by. The mountains were covered in pin forests. Occasionally, valleys were marked by narrow strips of farmland. The towns sprung out of nowhere, surrounded by fields. Main roads radiated from obvious city centers. There, at least, towns defined the highways, and not the other way around.

On our final descent into Boston, we flew over a cemetery. It was large, taking up several blocks, like the cemetery's in Long Island. The cemetery surrounded a small lake, a park almost, which seemed to have been an insurmountable obstacle that the graves grew around instead of covering up. The office of the cemetery, or chapel, or whatever, was nestled among the graves and the gravestones and looked from the air like a Swastika, only backwards.

I wondered whether the people who build things, cemetery offices or cities or farms, whether they think about what their creations would look like from the air, from Heaven. I wondered who the first person was that thought to put the numbers of buses on the top, like in Speed. And they say the Reg is supposed to look like the U.S. from above. I think it's just a coincidence. But I always, when I'm flying, try to figure out where I am by looking at the landscape. Is that lake Superior? Is that river the Hudson? Is that city Albany? Is that cluster of houses Home? If only I knew more about the birds' world, and the pictures they could take.

As the wheels bumped, bumped, bounced, and spun, and the rubber painted itself upon the runway, I looked down at the pavement marked with lines and symbols and letters that I hoped the pilot understood. Now, it looked just like it did from the ground.

"What's this little guy doing over here?"

It's the unexpected remembrances that are the most painful. A stray phrase I hear in my head, Bethany's voice. At once memory can no longer be held by the levies that months of forgetting have built. One phrase a crack in the dam, and the pain collected and barricaded is released.

I was at the Monet museum in Paris. I had been wanting to go for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it until the trip was almost over. It's not nearly as well known as the others, but I actually found it to be one of my favorites.

Throughout my trip, I had been looking for a museum where I could go to write; there was only so much money I could spend buying drinks at cafes in order to sit at the tiny round tables, barely big enough to hold a saucer with a cafe creme, a book I occasionally would pick up and pretend to read, and my little black Moleskine.

Orsay was too crowded all the time, and the seats were always taken. The Louvre was filled with school groups and Americans who talked, and the incessant images of Jesus bleeding while on the cross weren't exactly inspirational.

But the Monet museum was quiet and small, and I really liked the Monets - haute art for the pedestrian, covering post cards and notebooks and posters, yet still "art". There was one room in particular, a round one on the bottom floor, with almost 360 degrees of water lilies and benches in the center. I sat down and turned from one painting to the next, studying them and resting my tired feet at the same time.

An American family came in, in shorts and non-stylish jeans (I was in Paris, and my inner snob couldn't help but come out). They talked about the paintings, and the kids were bored just like I had been when I was their age. And I'm a little amazed that I just wrote "when I was there age" - today I was sitting on the floor by one of the low tables in Uncle Joe's and when I got up my knees cracked and I groaned and I though "I am SO old". But anyway I wanted to walk up to them and tell them "Wait a few years, you'll be glad your parents brought you here."

But then I looked at one water lily, dark blue and a pale yellow-white. It was similar to the other ones, but there was one lily off in the corner, all alone. It stuck out to me as I knew it would have stuck out to her, and I heard in my head her voice and the comment she would have made had she been there. By that point I had been alone in Paris for 8 weeks, and alone everywhere for 4 months, and that little comment, which would have been followed by a laugh, it stung me.

I never went back to the Monet museum.

Closerie Part One

The Closerie was nicer than I had expected, and more expensive. Sitting down at a table would have required ordering from the high-priced menu, so I sat at the bar, at the end, by the wall.

French bars, or zincs, do not have stools. Men - usually men - stand and drink their beers and their espressos and talk and lean on the metal counter top with their elbows. If a bar has stools, it is called an American bar. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes about how they put in an American bar at the Closerie and made the waiters wear white jackets and cut off their mustaches. So I was not surprised that the Closerie had an American bar. But that didn't stop me from being disappointed.

Hem was to my left - looking older and smiling, his face well lit and full of color. He was clean-shaven in that picture, except for the mustache. His hair was slicked back, and he looked happy. It must have been hot in Havana because he wore a light collared shirt.

Behind me he didn't look as happy, but he was writing, so I thought he was probably happier in truth. He had a beard in that picture, which was larger.

There were more pictures all over the Closerie, and I wondered when the owners had decided to put them in. He was even on the cover of the menus. I imagined a meeting where the owners and managers discussed whether to make the Closerie like a Hemingway version of Dollywood.

At a table on the other side of the room, a man read Le Monde and wrote in a small pad of blank paper. He was the only other person there who was writing, besides me. The prices were too high now, for writers and poets. There is something romantic about the poor writer, like the poor saint. What is it that makes poverty a virtue, there?

A few stools down at the bar sat a man with hair that was white with wisdom and troubles and reminded me of Walt Whitman, like the huge sculpture of his head that comes out of the wall in one of the buildings on campus. He ordered an American beer - though his accent told me he was French. As he spoke, he traced the letters of his words in the air with his finger, as if transcribing his speech in an invisible court record.

The fleeting beauty of a too-long moment

It was pouring outside. I don't mean "it was raining." I mean pouring, "raining cats and dogs" as they say.

Some were smart and had brought umbrellas. They, the people who say things about the weather, they had been saying for several days it was going to rain. And these smart people had listened.

Others, perhaps shortsighted, perhaps isolated from weather reports and from people who look at weather reports and then tell everyone, perhaps poor, perhaps rebellious, they did not have umbrellas. Of these, some ran, maybe with a newspaper or just a hand sheilding them from the deluge. Others took it like men (and women) and pretended themselves dry.

I looked down at the dripping black umbrella by my feet, the kind that opens and closes by pressing a button, and wondered who these people were who ran and walked unprotected in the rain. At first I thought that the people who walked were the rebel faction of the Umbrellaless. Then, I thought perhaps the rebels were the running ones. Maybe they just enjoyed running through and away from the rain.

I shivered from the excessive air conditioning in Peet's Coffee and Tea. It was as if, simply because it was summer, the managers thought it would be hot out. Must be new to New England. Seasons mean nothing.

Across the street, the Coolidge stood out clad in neon blue and pink, period costume. The Coolidge was a great theater, like the Three Penny or the Music Box in Chicago. They were next to Upper Crust, some really great pizza. And they were across from the Brookline Booksmith, one of those few indie bookstores left.

Peet's, even, wasn't bad. It wasn't Starbuck's at least, though it was half a block down from a Starbuck's. It was still corporate. But the people were friendly, and the store wasn't designed like some hippie's breakfast nook. So, when I could find a seat, I would do my best to make a cup last a couple hours.

A girl walked by in a flowing dress or skirt. The movement caught my eye and I looked up for a moment. The fabric moved fluidly, rhythmically, beautifully, perfectly. It harmonized with her movement and I understood the beauty of dance. Then, looking at it a moment longer: the spell is broken. Now, the hem is kicked violently by her legs, the fabric seems attached to the calves. If I had looked a moment later, I would have missed the beauty of such a simple thing as a flutter of fabric. If I had stopped looking a moment earlier, that beauty would have remained unblemished.

Nothing makes you want to vomit quite like adolescence

I was looking through a box in my room today that contains sundry minutiae and came across an old piece of writing I did in high school. It reeked of adolescence, a smell of utter naiveté and self-importance. How had I written this, I wondered? How had these words traveled through my fingers to my keyboard and onto a page to be read by whoever came across it?

The writing was for a class I had with Mr. McGraw. He was that teacher, for me, like Robin Williams' character in Dead Poet's Society. The thing is, I don't think he liked me that much. Maybe that was why I liked him.

At the beginning of class each day he would have us write a word we had found on the board. It had to be a word we didn't understand, or didn't know before. Then he'd go off on these rambling off-the-cuff etymologies with digressions that would take half the class. He'd take some word and trace it to some poem or line, from Milton or the Clash or somebody, and break it open, letting the word's meaning scramble itself on the classroom floor.

He coached baseball at the school and he had this whole jock/intellectual, Irish-working-stiff/Harvard-divinity-school, rebel/conservative thing going on. His hair was long for a man of his age, and haphazard, as if his inner contradictions had, in their chaos, tousled out any part he might have attempted.

He was a vet, the first I had really known. I had a teacher in middle school who had been in the army during Vietnam, but he hadn't actually gone overseas, and I was too young then, anyway, to know anyone really.

Once, he proudly told us, feeling that the buys on the baseball team were insufficiently awed by the horrors of the first Gulf war, he had forged draft cards for each of them and put them in their school mailboxes. The kids had panicked, calling parents, parents calling the school, the school calling the head of the English department, the head of the English department calling Mr. McGraw.

I think Mr. McGraw told that story out of gratefulness of the department chair who advocated for him not to get fired, but it was also partly an attempt to remain the rebel. Intellectually, he was certainly "out there". But he was teaching at a prestigious New England prep school - how rebellious could he be? He wrote everything on a typewriter and told stories of Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. He was steeped in the past, but I'm not sure how much of that was rebellion and how much was simple conservatism.

Still, I was glad he didn't teach like everyone else; we didn't do grammar and we didn't really write papers. We wrote, though. Every week, every Wednesday, we wrote. Not papers, just writing. And, though I can taste the sour-bitter sick at the back of my throat when I read the products of that era, that was the first time I wrote regularly. So, I credit Mr. McGraw for me writing at all.

L'Humiliation

A week after I got to Paris I was riding on the metro in the evening I think with Roz and Roger when a woman walked on and fell onto the floor and embarrassed herself and embarrassed all of us. She was drunk, rosy cheeks and that particular kind of swaying that drunks have. She stared down at her unbuttoned shirt which was too small for her large body anyway.

Roz wanted to take a picture - I guess it was one of those experiences you have abroad and want to remember - but there was a man in the way.

I told Roz that we all have moments of weakness; we all have moments where we can't figure out how shirt buttons work and fumble with them in our fingers while the train rocks gently and then suddenly beneath us. We all have moments where we resign ourselves to sitting on the floor because we cannot manage to stand.

I told her you shouldn't capture such a moment, since then that person would exist to you only as a pitiful jester and not as a person.

I told her she shouldn't take a picture, but I would have looked at it and laughed if the man hadn't been in the way and Roz had taken a picture. And I took my own sort of picture, in my notebook. And now I'm showing it to anyone who cares to look at it.

And I don't know the woman's name, I don't know why she was so drunk, whether she had reason to be, as if one needs a reason to be. I knew only that she was embarrassing to me and that is the content of the picture I have taken. And so, she does exist only as a jester.

We went to dinner, the three of us, I imagine. And when, again, we boarded the metro, we sat across from a man and a woman who were speaking French. I could tell that they were talking about a trip he had been on because I spoke a fair amount of French. Roz and I could tell that he was talking about a trip to Los Angeles because he did that thing that people do where they'll break their tone as they switch into a different language, as if they're speaking in italics:

Bien sûr, ç'etait bien, le voyage...

And then they switch out of italics to say some foreign word:

Oui, j'y suis allé, à Los Angeles, l'année passée et...

So we could both clearly hear when he said "Los Angeles." And he was disparaging the city (which I myself do) and I could tell because I could somewhat understand and Roz could tell because of the tone.

What the man, the man who kept speaking and kept saying "Los Angeles", what he couldn't tell was that I spoke French and Roz was from Los Angeles. The two of us looked at each other, unsure what to do.

Eventually he realized what was going on and he spoke to us in English. He asked Roz if she was from California and she said yes and then he asked if she was from LA and she said yes even though she was from Long Beach. He nodded with pursed lips and the rest of the metro ride was distinctly awkward.

We got out to transfer to a different line, and as we waited for the new train on the platform, a man sitting on the chairs near us began to speak. It is entirely common for homeless people to sit in the metro. Every night of the week there is a summit of wanderers, a subway salon. Beards and raggedy hats. Fighting cold with wine and rhythm. "Yes" the guru would say to the curious student on the floor. "Yes" he would repeat, and then he would drink in more wisdom from the bottle. Meanwhile, the beat would continue.

But this man, this homeless man was alone. He had no followers. Of course, he thought differently. He talked to a point a few feet in front of him. He argued and cajoled with this point. He gesticulated with his hands and his eyes. And he was stunned when he received no reply. Why did his friend, his friend who wasn't there, why didn't he understand him? The man, the real man, although who's to say, but the man we thought, at least, was real, turned to us in disbelief. He gestured to the point where there was only air and yelled, to us and to others, his epiphany:

"Il n' parle pas français! Il parle pas français!" He does not speak French. He doesn't speak French.

L'Attrape-Cœurs sur le Metro

I was walking to the metro platform. 4 line, I think. The train arrived, and departed just as I approached the doors.

Four young men, like 1950's prep schoolers, had gotten off. One has a Holden-Caulfield-like hat, in camouflage, which he sometimes wears backwards. Two have long coats, retro and irreverant. Their steps are lightened with youth and revery.

They joke as they check the map for the metro. One tosses his Holden-Caulfield hat and catches it. They are in the wrong place, but with a laugh and a jaunt they turn around and take the same line they just got off, only in the opposite direction.

They walk four-abreast up the stairs, then two run up the short escalator, while the other two stay put. They have short cropped hair and one has a beard. They have lean faces with youthful features. Carefree and free of cares.

There is no drama. They seem to have one of the simple male friendships that no longer seem to exist, at least not for me.

My ex-roommate and ex-best-friend-at-college, Will, and I used to have that kind of friendship. The one that didn't need any events or activities to hold it together, but wasn't all gushy and full of emotion. It was clean and uncomplicated. We lived together. We hung out together. At some point, we started drinking together. We talked about sports and classes and politics.

People used to call me and Will "Brill", we were together so much. (With Laura, of course, it became "Brilla".)

For a variety of reasons, I didn't have that anymore. Will had shown his true character, and no one among my friends talks to him any more. His own roommates make fun of how anti-social he is.

The thing is, Will was only capable of the guy friendship. He couldn't tell me why he was angry with me, except by telling me he wanted to move out. And now he's alone. Like Holden. But without the ability to write it all down.

It's a bad workman that blames his tools - Part Deux

After I bought my nice pen, which had a textured black surface, almost like the great salt flats, and silver accents, I went to the Louvre. Mostly I went because it was Wednesday and the Louvre was open late on Wednesday. I walked through the museum looking for someplace to sit down but I didn't like the paintings and I didn't want to sit down and look at paintings I didn't like.

I preferred the Musée D'Orsay. I had a card that allowed me free entry to all the museums, and I often went to D'Orsay, even for only a few hours. The first time I went I had been stupefied.

The museum breathed and whispered with the echoed din of the late afternoon crowds. On the cover of the museum maps, there was a flag indicating the language of the map, and all the mingling, meandering spectators proudly showed their national colors, as if they were wearing army uniforms. When I entered, always looking for the perfect camouflage, I had picked up a French map.

There were a number of group tours, and I tried to mooch off one French group. I would pause especially long in front of the painting that happened to be next to the really famous one that they were looking at, trying to eavesdrop. Since I didn't really care about what they thought, it wasn't that hard to keep up.

Museums are designed to encourage a certain flow, a certain path through the works of art. Because of this, you become part of a sort of cohort, a group of visitors who began around the same time and progress through the museum together. You get to know your cohort: the French kid with the curly hair, the girl with the tight braids, the two British young women who go from painting to painting arm in arm.

Tidbits of overheard conversations can reveal a lot. Should some people hide their map and therefore their nationality, a few strategic seconds spend sharing a particular painting can help you ferret out their nationality. Sometimes you learn that people with French maps are British. And some are American.

You get to know which pairs are friends and which are lovers.

Looking at paintings in a museum is supposed to be a silent, and therefore solitary, activity. Some couples spend hours walking in opposite directions around rooms, only sharing knowing glances when they meet midcircuit. Perhaps they can evade suspicion for one room, maybe two, but thereafter you can pick them out easily.

It's a bad workman that blames his tools

I got off at Odéon in search of the last store in Paris to sell Moleskines. See, I believed all the marketing materials that moleskines were used by Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Matisse. And I had gotten one in Chicago - unaware of the "history" - and thought I'd check out what the pamphlet in the back of the notebook called "a Paris stationary shop in Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie".

They are certainly good notebooks - small, light, good paper, fold flat, and the pocket, which is useful. And the elastic and the bookmark - both useful.

And I like tools. Like, when I cook, I need the right tools. I can use canned chicken broth instead of homemade, and honey instead of sugar, but I simply can't make sautéed chicken cutlets without a non-nonstick pan, and tongs. And I can't make cookies without my stand mixer and parchment paper. And pot roast without a dutch oven (a cast iron dutch oven, please)? Forget about it.

So I walked down Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie but there was nothing there, at least no stationary shops. But, right off Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, there was a street that was blocked off to cars and I found a store there with leather notebooks and quills and ink and all the artifacts of writing.

There was only one other person in the store and he was talking to the owner. When I came in, he looked at me and started speaking in a low voice as if he were plotting a revolution. Like all revolutions, this one would start with pens and paper.

I still had plenty of room in my Moleskine so I couldn't justify buying a new one. I looked at the calligraphy pens and the inks and the paper that was designed to greedily suck up the ink. I wished that I could write calligraphy so that when I write I would be sure that, even if the words were trite and banal, they would be beautiful.

I looked at the pens and saw one that I liked. It was black and heavy and well-balanced and the tip flowed easily over the paper.

It is important to have a good pen when writing. Or perhaps I just think it is. But once I had a good pen, I was pretty sure having a good pen was necessary. Just like a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet.

Environment, too, is important. I could not write before I came to Paris. I tried but I could not. In Paris I relearned how to notice things and see things, the way a child sees them, utterly novel and fascinating and foreign.

I bought the pen and got onto the metro again.

L'Escapisme

In Paris, I walked around wearing earphones a lot. Sometimes I would listen to music, sometimes not. Earphones, like sunglasses, build a barrier between you and your surroundings. In a way that is what I like about them, that they cut you off from the world and cut the world off from you.

But really what I like is that they liberate you to observe without interacting. You're engrossed in your own activities, so you are ignored. People have private conversations thinking you cannot hear. People assume you are not staring but rather gazing off into the distance.

I also like sitting by the window in the metro and looking out the window but really looking at the reflection in the window. I learned this from a Robert B. Parker detective novel where Spenser, the main character, whom I liked very much and in part wanted to be, because he could look in the fridge, find only a chicken breast, a half an onion, two leeks, a lemon, a beer, and a wedge of parmesan and whip up a gourmet meal for him and his long-term-monogamous-partner-but-not-wife-in-an-enlightened-way Susan. Also, he's a badass, and the thing about being a badass, is that your necessarily cool. Anyway, Spenser used the window-reflection technique to follow a culprit.

I don't look for culprits. Well maybe I do but not culprits who break the law. Like the white French kid who lived in Paris and thus was almost certainly nor poor (I know, I know, bad Brian, bad! stereotyping like that. Bad liberal, you should know better!). But anyway, he wore a long black trench coat and sunglasses even though it was cloudy and also big black boots. His hair was spiked in a faux-hawk. And he looked angry and depressed and clearly he was not going to let anything or anyone cheer him up or tell him that his life was anything but horrible. What did he have to be angry about? Then again, what didn't he have to be angry about? He was a teenager. Does that mean he gets the right to be angry?

I'm reminded of a story my professor, Romi, told me in Paris. He was pretty eccentric, and I won't bother going through the long story how he ended up in a cafe in the banlieus (the suburbs) of Paris, many of which have heavily immigrant and poor populations. Suffice it to say, it involves a girlfriend, a mental hospital where doctors are treated just like patients, and psychoanalysis.

But anyway, he was in the banlieus and saw this kid with an ipod that was so loud that Romi could hear the song, which was 50 cent, or as Romi said, "fifty cent", instead of "fitty cent" or, for those of us who are tight with him, "fitty". Anyway, Romi, because he's like that, was thinking about how American culture was globalizing, and how these French kids in the "ghettos" of France are listening to gangster rap that idolizes violence and such, and this was right after the whole lets-riot-and-burn-cars thing, so he was being all intellectual and then he noticed that the kid was rewinding the song over and over again, listening to the same verse dozens of times. And Romi was like, what is this kid doing? Not only is he listening to gangster rap, but he's like honing in on this one verse. And what does it mean that he lives in a place where it makes him want to listen to music about hos and beating and shooting people and everything?

And then, he goes up and asks the kid, in French, why he kept listening to the same verse. And the kid, in French, says "I'm trying to understand the lyrics. Do you know what he's saying?"

This kid wasn't glorifying the gangster life, or identifying with the American ghetto. He was just a French kid listening to American music simply because it was American.

I wonder, whether the French kids, not the children of immigrants, who are genuinely suffering, but the kids like the one on the bus in the trench coat and the black boots. Are those kids just trying to be American? Maybe they're not angry at all. Maybe they just know that Americans, or some Americans, dress like that and act like that and America is cool there like Europe is cool here, and they're just missing the whole point, the whole message of the all-black clothing and combat boots look. Just like Hemingway went to Paris and stopped going to the Closeries as soon as they installed an American bar. We're all just trying to be somewhere else.

Blizzards and the Natural Wrath

I'm sitting on the couch in my apartment under a comforter and several blankets as the snow falls sideways outside.

It's a blizzard, and it reminds me of home. They say the wind is gusting to 40 mph, and we'll get several inches of snow (I'm thinking, only several?). But for the fact that I put off my laundry until today, I'm pretty happy about the weather. I like slogging through the snow drifts - Nic canceled class today because "This weather is ---damn ridiculous. There's snow drifts outside for Pete's sake" - and feeling my cheeks sting as my torso is sweating. I like being inside, in heat, with some herbal tea (saw the doctor today and she said my tonsils were "huge", so I'm trying to stave off illness), my computer with internet, and many hours of work to do, while outside there is chaos; beyond my cheap windows (the down side of paying for the head instead of K&G - they have no reason to invest in some decent windows) in the titanium gray, nature is happening.

I am amazed at how much the trees are bending, how they are both supple and hard. There's a bird's nest jostling in a treetop, yet it does not fall, or fall apart.

This is why I want to live in cities for the rest of my life. Only there is the contrast between man and nature so pure and crystalline. The trees all manage to stand, with nests nestled among the tippity-top branches. The animals find places to go and stay alive. But I can barely walk a mile to school. And cars slip off the road traveling at only 5 mph. And this is Chicago, the Winter City, the city where snowplowing is a partisan affair.

Speaking of snowplows. In four years at the U of C, I have never seen any snowplows on the streets, except for a few U of C ones. Richard M. Daley, Mayor controls the plows. Richard M. Daley, Mayor hates the South Side. No one plows the South Side. Interesting.

Anyway, this is Chicago and people should be used to snow and yet still a day of hard snow just shuts everyone down. Nature, a mother and devil, comes in and seizes the streets and the sidewalks and forces you to look at her, to recognize her grip on everything, her grip which is slowly, slowly tightening around us as we keep poking her in the ribs.

But I am here, in my apartment, where the only gusts come from the heating vents and the only snow is the the pile of slowly-melting flakes on my pants. And still, Nature wins in the end:

I have to go outside now to creep down the rickety wooden back stairs, covered in snow and ice and most certainly the gravest threat to my life that I will face today, and put my laundry into the dryer.

iLifestyle

As soon as I started thinking seriously about writing, I started thinking seriously about getting a mac.

A mac is not a computer, it is an accessory, like a Prada bag or a studded leather belt. It's part of a lifestyle, one that includes certain kinds of music, fashion, professions, political views, socioeconomic status, and religious beliefs.

Fed up with my Dell that couldn't manage to sleep and then wake up again without crashing, it was time for be to get a new computer. And I was drawn by the sleek youth-centric curves and styling of not just the MacBooks, but the iMacs and the iPod Videos and the iPod Nanos and the iPod Shuffles and even just the store itself. I mean, you walk into the store on Michigan avenue and you can't help but feel cool.

And that's what they've done, Apple that is. Think 3-some-odd percent market share in the PC market is a problem? Nah: it's an opportunity, they realized. It means Macs aren't the computers you used in school (though they are), they're the computers you don't use at work. They're the rebels, the anti-establishment technology. They're for people who are what used to be called "out there": artists and students and young people and hipsters.

So when I bought the black MacBook Core 2 duo, I asked the cashier, "So, does this thing come with some hipster mix cd, a pair of Chuck Taylors, and hipster jeans?"

He stepped away from the counter and looked down at his Chuck Taylors, his tight black jeans, and his Shuffle (given to all employees), which no doubt had a fair amount of Neutral Milk Hotel.

Communist Neon

One night in Paris I wanted to go to see a French film. The French word for "film" is "film," and they don't really have a word for "movie." The French, of course, would say they didn't need a word for "movie". If it's in French, it's art, and if it's art, it's un film. Only Americans have movies.

I knew I wouldn't understand the movie, but I didn't mind. The fun part about watching a French film in Paris is not the film; it's the theater and the people in it. I didn't care which movie I saw, so I went to the MK2 (they pronounce it em kah deu) movie theater (they'd call it a cinéma), which is a chain in France, without looking at the listings beforehand.

The theater was in an area called Stalingrad. Later I learned that the area was named after the bloodiest battle in history: the battle of Stalingrad of 1942, in which 1,500,000 million people were killed or wounded. But at the time, it sounded strange and Communistic.

The metro there goes aboveground like the El, and the place feels like certain areas of Chicago, like parts of the Green line that are vaguely seedy and industrial, yet clearly antique. There's a lot of graffiti and general grime, which I admit was a nice change from the polished cobblestones of, say, the 1st arrondissemont in the center of town.

So I was a little surprised to see the Stalingrad MK2, two buildings on either side of one of the canals with still, impossibly still water, and a small ferry that crosses from one building to the other every ten minutes. The buildings have neon lights, red and blue, that reflect crystal clear in the stagnant water until the ferry cuts through and blurs and distorts the garrish light of a single, pure, distilled frequency.

It was the Las Vegas Strip meets the Washington DC Reflecting Pool meets Venetian Canals meets Behind the Iron Curtain, and yet it was also unmistakably and vividly French.

But then I got to the actual cinema and the only films they were showing were American except for one Canadian one with Kevin Bacon in it and a Spanish movie that started too late. I decided to go to the Canadian one - that'd be the most French, right? - and wondered how to kill an hour.

I didn't have time for a real French dinner, but there was a cafe in the theater, as usual, and I sat down and asked for a demi (a half pint of beer) and a croque monsieur (a ham sandwich with gruyere on top and then grilled). Since coming to Paris, my favorite beer was Stella Artois, which was actually Belgian, I think, but the name is French, and it's everywhere in Paris, or I thought it was everywhere, so it's my French beer.

But the MK2 in Stalingrad, the one that wasn't showing any French movies, it didn't have Stella. So I got a Heineken. And then I got some bread. But the bread was awful. Now, it's important to know that, in France, the bread is made from like four ingredients, like flour, salt, water, and yeast. There may be more, but they're all entirely pronounceable things, no preservatives. So it goes stale after a day or two and so they have to make it every day and it's so good and soft and white and crispycrusted goodness, and so in comparison, American bread, mostly, is awful. But the bread at the MK2 was awful not only be French standards, but by American standards as well, I mean it was dry and hard and the crust was mushy and it was simply disgusting. And I didn't know that was possible, I mean I didn't know it was even possible to get bad bread in France, like I thought that was the kind of thing the government would shut you down for, not for roaches in the kitchen or mice in the cupboards but stale bread and BAM some department locks the door, puts a big F in the window and you cry yourself to the appeals office.

On the other hand, the beer was, as always, excellent and intoxicating, even if it was Dutch (of course).

The Regrets of a Student Inactivist

There were maybe 50 people at the Student Activists' Conference, a pretty good showing. The panel was rather interesting; Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground was there, for example.

But what was weird was that Bernadine told us all not to reminisce about the '60s and not to believe what she called the "product" that the media have advertised. Then, they all proceeded to reminisce about the '60s. There was some regret; regrets about tactics and causes, like the environment, that they hadn't realized would be so important. But there wasn't a regret about blowing things up. And there wasn't a regret about the hypocrisy of student activism. I don't think activism should have stopped because of hypocrisy, only that it's important to represent hypocrisy as intrinsic in taking any stand whatsoever.

There's a level of self-awareness, a sort of self-awareness of sin, that is a moral imperative. We must recognize that we are all sinners, that we are all hypocrites, and that we are all wrong. Bernadine did say that she thought she had matured because she was no longer so certain of her own correctness. That's a good sign. But I think the current administration is the perfect example of what happens when people, even arrogant young people like me, don't recognize our failings and our fallibility.

But as I criticize, I guess, these people who have done such great things, I have an urge to do just what they tell me not to do - to follow them in their radical lives, to take over buildings and sit down as the cops beat me. But it's just adolescent rebellion, the rebellion I never had.

As I listened to the alumni activists, al these regrets came to my mind. Regrets of my own four years that are not yet over hear, of my own 22 years that I can never relive.

College is sort of a microcosm for life, in that you are born under the mentorship of those that came before you (like your parents), and they leave your life in waves, as the generations of you parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents leave your life. Then you end up a crochety old fourth year cursing yourself and the young ones that now have taken your place.

So, like life, I guess it's understandable to have regrets in college. But I can't help feel like there would have been so many things I would have done, so many causes I would have devoted myself to, so many different classes I would take and professors I would talk to, and, perhaps most of all, so many places I would have gone to, if only...if only I'd known.

And now, as I look upon June 9th, I realize that I both can't wait to end this whole thing, and I wish I could do the whole thing over again. Which is exactly what everyone who's done it before told me I would feel, and exactly what i didn't believe.

Well, I've got 120 days left, 120 days without regrets.

Paris...in memoriam...and how we are young

There were about 40 U of C students studying in Paris with me and I didn’t know any of them before I got there. In high school I had acquaintances but few real friends, and I was glad when I came to college and was able to find a group of close friends. I thought I was set; I had figured out how to interact with people. Then I was in Paris and it was like high school all over again.

So for the first few weeks I was lonely. I didn’t have people I could just hang out with, I could just be with.

Three weeks after I arrived in Paris, when I still didn’t have a group of good friends, I came back to my room that looked like the Ikea version of a prison cell and saw that Dennis had sent me a message.

I went to middle school with Dennis, then high school, then college. We were close in middle school, part of the same 4 person group of guys. Then in high school I think he got fed up with my talking and my whining and we stopped really hanging out. In college, we keep telling each other we’ll do coffee, but we’ve only done it once.

The most time we’ve spend together after middle school was when we went to Davenport, Iowa to canvass for John Kerry. We went out together in the Davenport volunteer coordinator’s red truck and talked about old times in middle school.

There were only 48 kids in my class, so we both knew all the players, and Dennis was my main source for gossip from middle and high school. So we went over who was where, doing what, all those things that make you want to go to reunions. It was a good time.

The message he sent me in Paris was less fun though. The message read:

Brian,

I appologize for neglecting to inform you of the first piece of information earlier.

In mid-December Peter Bildner overdosed on heroin and died. He had been in rehab in Florida and was apparently doing well.

This morning, Taryn King collapsed unexpectedly and died while on study abroad in Ireland. This cause is still unknown.

I can't believe that two members of our class have died in less than a month and half.

I hope you are enjoying Paris.

Dennis

I hadn’t been close with Peter or Taryn. I remembered that Peter had brown hair and deep brown eyes. I realize now they maybe looked deep all the time because he was on something. He was a funny kid. I hadn’t known he was in rehab, or even that he was in trouble.

I remember Taryn’s red hair, but that was about it. In what I now see as an absurd example of the ways technology has changed the world, I instinctively looked her up on the Facebook. I guess I wanted to see who she had become.

Her wall had become a bizarre forum for messages of grief, like a white cross on the side of the highway with flowers. She had turned into a beautiful young woman who seemed to be living a nice life, like so many people do.

And then she was in Ireland and then she was dead. She had just collapsed. One moment, alive and bright, the next, on the floor, deathly ill.

I was scared and I was sad. Out of 48 people, 2 were dead by 22, and everyone knew Sam didn’t have long, though not everyone knew why. When I saw Dennis in Iowa, he said they were considering having a 5-year reunion instead of a 10-year reunion so Sam could go.

And I couldn’t avoid seeing the parallels. I had been thinking of going to Ireland after the program in Paris was done. I was abroad, without real friends, out of my life, and tomorrow I could have been hit by a crazy French driver or just fallen down with no explanation. My mortality became uncomfortably real, and my death became maturely possible.

The Gayest B&B ever

The only time I’ve ever been asked out was in Florence, Italy, by a guy.

My friend Roger and I had a week off from our study abroad program in Paris and we decided to take the train from Paris to Florence to Rome to Naples and then fly back to Paris.

On the train ride down we had shared a compartment with just the two of us. We went to dinner together in the dining car and sat next to an old couple that was speaking Italian. On the train you don’t really get your own table. You always sit next to someone. But we were separated by an invisible linguistic barrier from the couple next to us, so Roger was telling me graphic stories of his sex life with his ex-boyfriend, straight out of Sex and the City.

We were close friends by that point so I wasn’t uncomfortable or anything, until the couple next to us started talking to us in perfect English. Worse, the old woman had actually lived in the States until her twenties, so there was no chance she didn’t understand such idioms as “blow job.” For the rest of the meal, the two of them looked at Roger and me with a sort of knowing glint in their eye. I got the feeling they thought we were a couple.

After returning to our compartment, we finally fell asleep, in separate bunks, somewhere in the Swiss Alps. Then we were both woken up in the middle of the night at an undisclosed location on the Swiss-Italian border by burly men (and a woman) in navy blue uniforms demanding, in Italian, our passports.

Before I had gone to sleep, I had had the clever idea to put my passport in my pillowcase and then under my head. No one could steal it there, I thought, and I had heard tales of daring train robberies. At 2 in the morning with a big guy in blue with an Uzi or AK-47 or whatever big gun he had, speaking Italian like a fascist, my idea to hide the passport didn’t seem quite as clever. But, I found it before he decided to shoot me, and we survived. Then, as they handed us back our passports, they looked at us with that same knowing glance.

In Florence we stayed in a cheap, but nice, hotel (winter rates are a wonderful thing). We had two beds, but then again the concierge who checked us in, the gray-haired lady who set up the continental breakfast, and even the maid kept giving us that look. I didn’t mind exactly. Better than people pitying me for being alone. Still, I was interested in the universality of the phenomenon.

The only person, it seemed, who didn’t think we were a couple was the Italian guy who asked me out, or something. He walked up behind me while Roger and I were walking back to the hotel after getting some gelato. He started speaking to me in several languages, because after each one I didn’t respond. I thought he was trying to pickpocket me. Roger, with his finely honed gaydar, knew what was up, and responded to him. Roger, with his fluent Spanish that resembled Italian, and the guy, with his broken English, tried to sort things out.

“No, I’m gay. He’s straight,” Roger said, gesturing to each of us in turn.

“No,” the guy said in disbelief, shaking his head.

I didn’t know whether to be flattered or not. I decided better accept flattery whenever possible. And, I had knowingly bought tighter jeans than I’d ever had before and lots of close-fitting sweaters.

“Yes,” Roger assured him. Then, in a manner I’ve never fully understood because it was at once subtle and forward, smooth and a little dirty almost, he managed to get the guy’s number. Sure, the guy had hit on me, but that wasn’t going to stop Roger from getting digits. In the end though, we were leaving the next day, and nothing came of it.

Well, actually, Roger sent him a text message on my behalf asking if the guy had a sister or something, and the guy replied that if he had a girlfriend he would be having sex with her, because he wasn’t gay. I guess that meant he was just European.

* * *

After Florence we went to Rome, where we stayed in what I charmingly refer to as “the gayest B and B ever.” (Called "The Roman and Italian Guest House", highly recommended for gay and straight alike.) The room had one bed, and was decorated in the manner of Ikea-meets-Warhol, complete with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis in shades of red, orange, and blue. Also, there was a breakfast nook.

Right there in the room, a breakfast nook.

The woman who ran the place was really sweet, as was her husband. But they both gave us that look. Of course, I really couldn’t blame them, what with the single queen bed. And honestly I was starting to enjoy it a little. I had missed the attention you get as a couple. I had missed people thinking I wasn’t alone, even if in fact I still was.

Of course, I wasn’t really alone. Roger and I were sleeping in the same bed (except for the night when he kicked my off the bed in his sleep), eating meals together, traveling together, going shopping for cute jackets (for him) together. We might as well have been dating, but for that whole having sex thing. Was that it, then? Was that the missing piece? Was this whole loneliness thing just a ruse, an intellectual and haughty version of pure horniness?

What was that spark, that, uh, je ne sais quoi, that thing that I wanted but that Roger and I could never have?

Maybe I was just being too picky. Maybe I wasn’t actually alone. Maybe I just thought I was. Maybe I needed to be ok being single, and realizing that single and alone aren’t the same thing. I've felt alone before in relationships, and I’ve felt so unalone with just my friends. But still.

There was something I needed to find, there was something I was looking for, something I was searching for and researching and hunting like a white whale that had dived into the winedark sea. Something that didn’t resemble anything I had actually had ever, which was why I couldn’t identify it. Something.

Was everyone else looking for the same thing?

Suuuuper!

Today I went to my friend Mary’s house to watch Super Bowl XLI, I think it’s XLI, on her big-screen HDTV. First, HDTV matters. It really matters. I could see the droplets of Miami-winter rain on the Bears’ uniforms, the fear in Rex Grossman’s eyes, and the relief in Peyton Manning’s face. Though, as one of my friends pointed out, it almost made it too real. It was like playing a video game, Madden 2007 say, instead of watching football.

I haven’t had enough time to wander around Chicago in the past couple of weeks to get a really good idea of Bears-mania. But, the buildings downtown have their lights spelling out “Go Bears”, and they’re putting out special issues of the papers. There’s certainly a sense of excitement and a higher-than-normal chance of seeing a Bears jersey or hat.

I love football. It’s my favorite sport by far. I know, intellectuals are allowed to like baseball, but football’s supposed to be for big Midwestern guys with mustaches and a Bud Lite in each hand.

But I think football is the true intellectual sport. First, it is plainly strategic. Put an (allegedly) ‘roided-up Barry Bonds at the plate, and I don’t care if your outfielders are deep and your second baseman’s at the edge of the grass ready for a long cut-off throw; homers aren’t fielded, and you can’t out-strategize a 300-lb. guy with a bat.

But in football, every play starts from scrimmage, and every play requires that the defense have a shot to stop the offense. Every play gives both teams an opportunity to draw up their little x’s and o’s and pit them against each other. And then every play gives the players the opportunity to adapt their play and their position to suit what they see going on on the other side of the ball.

That’s the cool part. It isn’t just players strategizing, like in tennis where the coaches aren’t allowed to talk to the players during the game. And it isn’t just the coaches, like in baseball, where the players almost always have an opportunity to get the coach’s advice. I mean, they even have the third base coach, whose job it is to give the player the strategy of whether to stand up on the base or keep going to push it to third or home.

But in football the coaches set the play in motion but the players need to know every play, and every player, in order to take that play and adapt it to the other team’s strategy.

OK, so let’s say you’ve got third and one on your own 45 and the coach calls for a draw up the middle, right of the center. Then, the QB sees the safety inching up as he’s getting ready to snap the ball. Safety blitz? Maybe. Problem is, if it is a safety blitz, the running back’s going to be trying to drive the ball forward just as the safety’s filling the hole. A good QB will audible something else, maybe a run outside, allowing the safety to collapse into the line of scrimmage just as the running back is five yards down with no safety to stop him. Coach’s call might have been good, but it would’ve been awful if the QB hadn’t been able to read a defense.

So that’s why I like football as a sport. But what about as a phenomenon, as a means of entertainment?

I had a teacher once who blamed all wars on the lack of “festival”. If people couldn’t run around in big costumes high on alcohol or some other culturally-specific drug, then they’d run around in camo and shoot each other. I agree with him to a point, but only to a point.

But I do think that a festival, an event that involves competition and celebration with defined rules and proscribed conduct is healthy for a society as well as for individuals. People got to let stuff out, and they need to be able to dream big. Maybe a mechanic in Indianapolis doesn’t have much to look forward to in terms of what the elite thinks of as "a life"; without a 401(k), his retirement’s going to be mean, and with his long-term smoking habit, his health won’t be too swell either.

But, if he can take pride in a team, if he can find something to talk about while performing the umpteenth oil change, then so be it. And if he’s willing to watch advertising to do so, and therefore advertisers are willing to pay money to show games, then yeah, pay the players a reasonable amount. Most of the players come from disadvantaged backgrounds anyway, so let’s make sports, which requires discipline and initiative, let’s make it one route out of the ghetto or the blue-collar lower-middle-class donut hole so many people are stuck in.

I am an incredibly political person, and a liberal one at that. I’ve knocked on hundreds and hundreds of doors and made thousands and thousands of phone calls for political candidates. And I think it’s a shame that more people don’t care about politics. Domestic politics, even, it’s hard to interest people in, never mind international politics.

But I don’t think everyone can or should think about the miseries of this world with every waking moment. Because that just leads to us being miserable. And if you’re miserable over in your country, and, unable to really change anything in this particular moment, I’m miserable over here in my country, then neither of us is better off; we’re both just miserable.

And the point, the whole fucking point of this goddamned life is to try to not be miserable and help others do the same. So let’s watch our unimportant sports—that’s the point of them, that they’re unimportant—and live their drama by watching them and so make our own lives, unimportant as well, a bit happier, a bit more common among our fellow citizens, and a bit more full of chips, dip, beer, and Super Bowls.

Snippets of Paris

I told people I was in Paris to study. Really I was studying in order to be in Paris. But when French people asked me why I was in Paris, I knew how to say, “I am a student.” I did not know how to say, “I, like so many upper-middle class American students, am trying to quench my wanderlust.”

I realize now that that was indeed what I was doing: I was wandering and lusting.

Certainly I was searching for something, for the same thing everyone is: something more. I was looking for Enlightenment and Romance and Eudaemonia, the Aristotelian happiness-as-virtue that I had learned about in my classes at the University of Chicago. I was looking for a change, for something I couldn’t really identify because I didn’t have it.

Simply going to Paris was a change for me. I’d heard people talk about their experiences studying abroad, how they changed their lives. But I had never planned to study abroad because I hadn’t realized that I was so much like everyone else.

* * *

I went to Paris for the romance and found loneliness instead. I went for Hemingway and Joyce and Fitzgerald and found that the cafes they ate at were expensive, touristy places. I went for love and found it was a hoax, like blue arrows painted on the sidewalk, leading nowhere. But it was precisely that loneliness and lack of romance that helped me learn how to be alone and to enjoy being alone.

Often in Paris I would wander around while listening to my iPod, even though it was a very American thing to do. But the freedom those little white earphones provided me outweighed the possible threat to my cover as young, sexy Frenchman.

With my earphones on, I could sit across from couples on the metro and listen to them, staring at them even, and no one would pay me any attention. Everyone thought I was lost in music, gazing at nothing. So I could eavesdrop and spy and stare and stalk, even, following interesting characters while pretending to step in rhythm with the music.

I found a book at a café did the same thing: it created an invisible barrier between me and the other customers, so I could look furtively over the edge at an old woman with a strange hat or an old man who called the waiter by name. If I furrowed my brow as if considering some line I had just read, I could even look right at people.

The downside, of course, was I didn’t get as much reading done as I’d hoped, but the upside was I really saw Paris, the real Paris, the hallways behind the exhibits that are for employees only.